It was in 1998, during the Siggraph Symposium, that Paul Debevec introduced a method for integrating synthetic objects into “real-world” images. In his communication, Debevec revealed the secret of extracting light from any environment and rendering objects into this light. This simple method used a mirrored ball placed in the center of a space, which was photographed in a high dynamic range of light (HDR). By combining the resulting multiple-exposure images, Debevec created a single concave image, which functioned as an omnidirectional radiation map of the space. The HDR contained all necessary data to merge any alien object into
a pre-existing background.
Today we can see a good amount of HDR images on the internet, as empty scenarios longing for objects. In 2008, Miguel Soares used an HDR image of a Japanese interior as a starting point for his 3D animation wabane. Here the artist brilliantly inverted Paul Debevec’s process and, instead of inserting a common object in the light of an HDR scenario, he placed in it a floating moving mirror that changes shape according to sound. Wabane presents a shining post-apocalyptic living mirror that reflects, in its ever-changing curved surface, the void of an abandoned room.
After a residency period in Oporto, Miguel Soares will finally give us the opportunity of watching his HDR masterpiece, by far the video that best fits Oporto’s dimmed/doomed atmosphere. Along with wabane we will also be exhibiting white star, science fair and his latest video, naso. This selection of very short animations, or videos from a music album, as Soares refers to them, reveal carefully designed landscapes, digital terrariums optimized for the study of unknown creatures and things, entities that live and die to the laws of sound and nostalgia.
curated by Alexandre Estrela.

This year is the 500th anniversary of the first edition of Thomas More’s Utopia, the account of a portuguese traveller who describes a fictional island where the major problems of the society of the epoch seemed to have been resolved.

In his project at Galeria Graça Brandão, Miguel Soares simulates moments of a hypothetical nearby future, borrowing certain ideas from More’s Utopia and Joachim of Fiore’s Three Ages, as well as from the Portuguese “utopic tradition” (Luís de Camões, António Vieira, Fernando Pessoa); together with elements taken from the eschatology of some of the main religions, assembling them with the more recent ideas of Technological Singularity (Stanislaw Ulam, Vernor Vinge, Ray Kurzweil), and the Simulation Hypothesis (Bostrom’s trilemma), which has ancient roots in Plato’s Allegory of the Cave.

Will the progressive automation and replacement of human labour by machines be capable of setting the human being free, rendering obsolete the entire economical and political systems, and even the conception of State?

The Technological Singularity suggests that between 2040 and 2045 the future development of Artificial Intelligence may originate an exponential event in which machines build other, more perfect machines, in a progression that will evade human beings’ immediate understanding. Soon after, in 2048, it will be the centenary of George Orwell’s 1984. According to Miguel Soares’ proposal, articulated around an animation video and a set of images, this movement will create a sort of “machine of the world” capable of looking after and nourishing each human and managing the resources of the planet.

Is capitalism and competition only a tool, the only tool, to reach such goal? Could this succession of events generate an evolutionary leap in the human being, allowing for each person to find, for instance, their natural vocation?